Txema Yeste Spanish, b. 2/5/1972

A face at very close range, upside down. The chin is at the top of the frame with the lips slightly parted, then the nose, then the closed eyes under heavy lashes, then the eyebrows along the bottom edge. Everything is blue: the skin cooled to slate and pewter, the sky behind it gone nearly white. Fine droplets of water stand on every plane of the face. On the forehead, at the very bottom of the picture, a small dark feather lies on its stem.

The inversion does something specific. A face the right way up gets read as a person; a face upside down gets read as a surface, because the parts stop assembling themselves into an expression. Here the beading of the water registers before the skin does, and the lashes register before the eyes, and it takes a beat to put any of it back together into somebody lying down.

The feather is the piece that refuses to become texture. It is small and dry and precise in a photograph where everything else is soft and wet, and it has been placed, which means a hand was in this frame a moment before the shutter. Yeste works like this constantly, laying found objects on skin until a body turns into a surface for arrangement. The feather is the reminder that the surface belongs to somebody who is lying very still with her eyes shut.